Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to outbound campaign and particularly to an adaptive outbound campaign based on users' responses.
Description of Related Art
Existing are some outbound products that support outbound campaigns. For example, outbound products such as Proactive Contact (PC), Proactive Outreach Manager (POM), and Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) that cover different market segments with different feature sets in the area of outbound contacts and campaigns. An example of an outbound contact or campaign is the collection of notification issued by a power utility to inform its customers about an ongoing effort to restore power after a power outage.
Outbound contact and campaign products provide tools for designing campaigns and running them until completion or until the campaign designer manually changes the campaign and restarts it. Further, such manual reconfiguration of an outbound campaign through the campaign designer is based on instinct, direct user responses such as through return emails from users in response to campaign emails, or an analysis of business metrics that may be continuously tracked and that allow for comparison either before or after the campaign.
Such manual configuration of a campaign suffers from several challenges. To begin with, relying on instinct on the part of the campaign designer means that there is a significant risk of misjudging the audience reaction. As a result, the campaign may produce undesirable or sub-optimal user reactions because the campaign designer may misjudge the reaction of the target audience. Inviting audience feedback through evaluation “forms”, typically in the same communication modality as the campaign (voice, email, Web, SMS, and the like) means that users often do not or cannot disclose their true feelings about the campaign, and often has low user participation rates. Also, creating and manually collecting the results of such evaluation forms requires a substantial effort. Likewise, manually assessing user sentiment from direct user responses requires substantial effort, and the volume of such direct responses may be too low to obtain a good sense of the audience reaction to the campaign. Tracking business metrics before and during/after the campaign introduces a long latency into the campaign effectiveness evaluation. Subsequent changes to the campaign may be too late to be effective, and unrelated events may distort the measured impact of the campaign.
In conclusion, the true audience reactions may be known or understood by a campaign designer too late for a more successful reconfiguration of the campaign and thus reduces effectiveness of the campaign. Such late insight regarding true feeling of the users may slow down a required reconfiguration and thus may have a negative impact of the outbound campaign on the public and may reduce the market value of the outbound campaign accordingly. Due to the aforementioned, manual monitoring and campaign's reconfiguration can put a significant burden on the campaign designer and may further slow down any required reconfiguration.
On the other hand, users often post their thoughts on every conceivable topic, including business campaigns, on public social media and other online forums. These posts can be a highly valuable and timely source of feedback on outbound campaigns. Moreover, posts on social media can usually be correlated with characteristics of the posting user, such as age, gender, geography, language, and therefore allow deeper insights into the posted opinions than would be possible if the feedback were from anonymous users. Consequently, the outbound campaign can be fine-tuned for different demographics.
Based on the aforementioned, a system and a method are required to overcome existing challenges of outbound campaign by providing adaptive solutions for outbound campaign based on dynamic feedback to the campaign from users to enhance effectiveness of the campaign. As an example, the dynamic feedback can be retrieved from public social media and other online forums. Further, the system and the method should be able to enhance a positive impact of the outbound campaign on public and in business market. Furthermore, the system and the method should be able to reduce the burden from the campaign designer and to improve the process of reconfiguration. Thus, the outbound campaign should be effective and easily responsive in real time based on the true reactions to the outbound campaign of the users.